Ms. Kouri graciously agreed to speak with me by phone. Before speaking with her, I went back and watched Thelma & Louise again. It struck me as a much more significant movie the second time I watched it. My perspective as a feminist is more nuanced than it was in 1991, so my appreciation for what Ms. Khouri achieved in the script-- and its success-- is more profound. What's clear to me is that a good way to forward the cause of feminism is to cloak it in popular culture. While Thelma & Louise was outwardly feminist and caused quite a stir at the time it was released, Nashville is an example of a show that has ideas within story lines that espouse feminism, and does so in a way that does not cause outrage from certain segments of the population. I was anxious to speak with Ms. Khouri before she traveled east to give a Master Class at the Athena Film Festival in New York City.

Donnelly: Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me, Ms. Khouri. I love what you do, how the body of your work seems to combine pop culture with feminism in film and television. I’d like to talk about your first film, Thelma & Louise for a moment, if I may. When you first began writing the script for Thelma & Louise, were you aware that you were creating something that would be received as feminist?

Khouri: No. I certainly wasn’t aware that I was writing anything that was going to 1) stick around as long as it has; and 2) just the way it grabbed the zeitgeist of the moment, it became part of so many things that were happening between Anita Hill and all kinds of political combinations….Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. So the timing of it was very fortunate because it fit into a larger narrative at the time of people realizing that women’s roles have been narrowly defined long enough. Certainly it was not the first realization of that, not by a long shot, but I mean there were several incidents that seemed to all come together at that time.

So when you wrote it, you did not anticipate any problems of it getting picked up or produced at the time? You just wrote it to write it, as if you needed to get it out of your system?

Right. It was my first script. I didn’t have any idea that anything would ever happen to it beyond that I just wrote a script like 20 million other people in Los Angeles. It wasn’t like I knew it was going to get made or anything.

Do you think a script like that could be or would be made today?

It’s hard to say. It certainly would not have been a studio film. It had a lot going for it in that Ridley Scott attached himself as producer early on. And under those circumstances, it certainly had a better shot than if it was on its own. I am forever grateful for that. I mean who knows, there are some really great independent films that get made now. That is how it would have to be made now if it were going to be.

With that in mind, how have conditions changed in Hollywood for women? In general and for women who write feminist content? How has it changed in 20 years since you won your Oscar?

Well, I certainly don’t think the numbers are proportional in the amount of work that does get done. If you look at the Writers Guild numbers, Directors Guild numbers, you’ll see that it’s not remarkably different, which is really a sad state of affairs if your female. Clearly there’s much more awareness about it. It’s really a matter of looking at the statistics. I’d love to be able to point to one thing that says it's better, I’d love to be able to. It’s really beginning to be the world’s most boring conversation, you know? I think everybody’s sick of talking about it, I just wish it would change.

How do we get it to change?

You know, one film at a time, I guess. I mean, I certainly think just the awareness is a good place to begin… but it’s certainly not enough. Honestly, if I knew how to get it to change, I would have changed it for myself and a lot of other people. You can’t pin somebody down and get them to say women are just not good enough. Nobody in the world is going to say something like that. You’re not going to get someone to say that. But when it comes to hiring directors for feature films, writers and all of that—its still, the numbers are not encouraging. So I don’t know how to get it to change. I just know that for myself and the women I know that are working, you just have to keep slogging away. Finally, you have been doing it long enough, you have a body of work.

You and I are the same age, and we have been slogging away at it, building a body of work. Don’t you think talking about it is important, making the next generation understand that things are still not right for women?

I think that the expectation that there should be an equal shot there is certainly a good expectation to put in everyone’s minds.

I love what you are doing with Nashville. You are able to take the stereotypes and then write the women characters to be real and complex and not stereotypic at all, ultimately.